The present invention relates to an electronic musical instrument constructed such as to carry out a trial play based on timbre data belonging to a desired hierarchical level or class after an edit work of a timbre data hierarchy.
There is known a conventional electronic musical instrument of the type registering musical tone control parameters such as timbre parameters which can be edited. The conventional instrument can commence a trial play in response to a trial command during the course of the edit work of the registered control parameters to evaluate edited results. Further, a recent type of the electronic musical instrument registers the control parameters in a data hierarchy composed of hierarchical levels or classes such that the edit work can be conducted by class by class basis. However, in the electronic musical instrument having the data hierarchy of the musical tone control parameters, the trial play is carried out in response to a trial command during the course of the edit work, such that musical tones are generated based on control parameters belonging to limited classes not higher than an object class of the edit work. Consequently, it is difficult to readily evaluate how the edit results of an individual parameter affect the entire hierarchical structure in the trial play. Further, preceding parameters ranked higher than the edited class are not reflected in the trial play, hence trial plays must be carried out repeatedly with respect to various levels in order to obtain desired musical tones, thereby hindering efficient synthesis of musical tones.